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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the pleasures of eating mangoes in the face of dietary restrictions for type 2 diabetes in India, and conceptualises a means to locate fun by examining that which tries to constrain it. It situates fun as an 'overflow', a state of being taken in by the object of pleasure.

Paper Abstract:

Mangoes, whose consumption is restricted for type 2 diabetes in India, form a focal point where 'mazaa', the Hindi-Urdu lexical cousin of fun, is possessed, stolen, or arrives (Kabir 2020, Anjaria and Anjaria 2020). Restricting mangoes is akin to taking the fun out of one’s life; a tragedy that is avoided through careful calibration of medication, blood sugar measurement, and dietary austerities. In this paper, I draw upon 2 years of ethnographic research on the foods, medications, and technologies involved in type 2 diabetes care in urban, middle-class India. Using mango eating practices, I locate fun by examining the discourses and enactments of restriction, disgust, and moral disdain that try to contain and constrain it, and highlight the ruptures and fault lines from which fun re-emerges. I characterize this as an ‘overflow’ — a subjective state in which the body is performative of being taken in by the object of its pleasure and appears to lose willful control of itself. Fun possesses as it is possessed. For my participants, mango eating elicited ‘pichi’ or madness, alongside acts of ‘naughty’ thievery, rebellion, gifting, reminiscing, play, one-upmanship, and sensual engagements of slurping, licking, and handling fleshy chunks of yellow with bare hands. Between medical monitoring and madness, dietary control and the panacea of freedom lies a subjectivity of fun that both invites and threatens intervention, which I highlight as a means for us to methodologically recognize fun and its role in (de)constructing seriousness.